The Voyage of Their Life

by Diane Armstrong

  ‘Von Ribbentrop asked to see the youngest child in our transport, you see, and that was Pauline, so he bent down and kissed her hand!’

  Pauline is laughing so much that she has to put down the coffee jug. ‘I’m not game to tell my Jewish friends about that!’ she says.

  Now Vala is reminiscing about the journey to Germany which dragged on for two months. Waving her smooth, soft hand towards Pauline, she says, ‘When I was finally able to give her a bath, I didn’t recognise my own child. I thought she had dark hair! Do you remember?’

  Pauline rolls her eyes. ‘How could I? I was one month old!’

  As we chat about the voyage, Vala riffles in her handbag and takes out the yellowed telegram that she received in Germany from the Australian Immigration Department, informing her about their passage on the Derna. Taking out a compact to check her pink lipstick, she frowns at her reflection. ‘I look as if I’ve just come off the Derna !’ Now we’re all laughing because her pretty face and creamy complexion belie her self-criticism.

  The day she did come off the Derna , they flew to Brisbane to meet her husband. Viktor had moved there with his father after they were released from the internment camp at Tatura when the war ended. As the Australian National Airways plane taxied towards the airport building, Vala, who until that moment had been chattering non-stop, became very quiet. She was scanning the group on the tarmac.

  Following her mother’s gaze, Pauline craned forward. ‘Which one is it?’ she asked.

  Vala’s heart was thumping as she pointed to a solidly built man with dark hair. In a choked voice she said, ‘That’s him!’

  Meetings after many years of separation are overloaded with exhilaration, tension and disappointment. So much hope and longing are concentrated on an event that often collapses under its emotional burden. The joy of regaining a husband and no longer having to struggle alone is soon counterbalanced by the loss of freedom and independence. The reunion is a gossamer-fine bridge across a chasm of unshared experiences.

  You cannot cross the same river twice, nor meet the same person at the end of a long and difficult separation. Vala was no longer the dependent young wife she had been in Teheran in 1941. In the past seven years she had taken care of a tiny baby during their frightening journey to Ankara and during four years of exile in a foreign country. She had survived the privations of the war and the terror of Allied bombing, supported them after the war, and crossed the oceans, spurred on by the dream of being reunited with the man she loved.

  But after having been deported to a country at the other end of the world, interned in a camp for aliens and regarded as an enemy, Viktor had also changed. The witty, sophisticated older man who had swept her off her feet and made her laugh when she was an impressionable young girl with no experience of life or knowledge of her own strength, was now a reserved man whose conversations were punctuated by silences.

  But in one respect he had not altered, and that was his conviction that the man was head of the family. If Vala found it difficult to defer to Viktor again, Pauline, who had never known her father, found the adjustment even harder. For the first time in her life she did not have her mother’s undivided attention, and had to take orders from someone else. A bright, strong-willed child, she found the situation intolerable and distanced herself from it emotionally.

  ‘I saw it as an intrusion in my life and just shut down,’ is the way she explains it now. ‘To give you an example, I persisted in using the feminine form of adjectives even when I referred to my father, as though I didn’t acknowledge his role in the family.’

  After the exciting position Vala had held at UNRRA in Germany, where her work had been highly regarded, becoming a Brisbane housewife was a demotion. She disliked this tropical city where the pavements sizzled with such heat that it dried the breath out of her body. To make matters worse, she had no friends and missed the sophisticated people she had known in Munich. She became depressed and lost weight.

  Pauline was unhappy too. She hated the house in the inner city suburb of West End where she slept in the narrow sleep-out, detested the gloomy furniture with the bowl of waxed fruit on the dining table, and often vomited after meals. Today a psychologist would say that she was disturbed by the major life changes she had experienced, but in 1948 there was no vocabulary to express emotional turmoil and no patience to delve into the reasons.

  ‘I was terrified of my father,’ she recalls as we sit around the oak table in her rustic dining room while she serves paprika chicken casserole from an earthenware dish. ‘He seemed so large and so powerful. He was actually the first authority figure I’d ever experienced and he came between my mother and me. I suppose it must have been difficult for him too, because he had no idea how to win me over.’

  Pauline was the only foreign child at her primary school, a uniqueness she enjoyed. ‘All the foreigners were referred to as Balts, so the kids called you a Nut and Balt no matter where you came from. Sometimes they called me German Sausage or Citroen Front-wheel Drive. I had no idea what they were talking about but it didn’t upset me. It was just something they chanted. I felt different, but in a positive way because I got a lot of attention. I was a pretty feisty kid and if someone teased me, I gave as good as I got. We used to barter sandwiches. I always wanted their lettuce and vegemite, but when my mother helped out at the tuck shop, everyone wanted her rich Russian pastries.’

  A devoted teacher called Miss McBride made it her task to help Pauline learn English. ‘Every playtime and lunchtime she would take me aside and drill me in grammatical English,’ Pauline recalls. ‘If she ever heard me saying “youse” in the yard, she’d haul me inside and correct me. I started imitating her and ended up with an English accent!’

  While Pauline was adjusting to life in Brisbane, her father was demoralised because he couldn’t find work as an engineer. He pottered in the shed at the back of the house making furniture, but couldn’t see any future for himself. Halfway through 1949, he received a letter from a friend in Geelong urging him to move there because with two big local factories, Ford and International Harvesters, there were plenty of employment opportunities. Vala couldn’t pack fast enough.

  Geelong in 1948 was an insular town where people swivelled their heads in shock whenever they heard Vala and Viktor speaking Russian or German. Foreigners were still a novelty and the ABC Café was the local version of a restaurant. The Italian fruit shop was the only shop that stocked garlic, but the greengrocer kept it under the counter because only reffos ate it. Vala gives a deep-throated laugh. ‘In those days Australia was divided into two groups of people: those who ate garlic and salami and those who didn’t!’

  Life was grim that first year in Geelong. Although Viktor obtained work in the Ford factory which was producing cars to compete with the popular new Holdens rolling off the assembly line at GMH in Melbourne, he was despondent. The war had interrupted his engineering career in Teheran and brought him to Australia to become a factory labourer. Vala, who spent her days typing invoices in the office of International Harvesters, was upset for her husband but tried to console herself that at least they were a family again and Pauline had a father.

  While scanning the employment notices in the newspaper one day, Viktor saw that the Geelong Water Works and Sewerage Trust were looking for an engineer able to use a theodolite. He applied with some trepidation because he had no documents to prove his qualifications, but they employed him and in time he became the site engineer on the West Bowen dam. Having a well-paid, responsible position commensurate with his skills restored his self-respect.

  Things improved for Vala too. When the girls high school advertised for a secretary, her engaging personality, along with the glowing references from UNRRA, helped her get the job. Some time later, when the headmistress decided to introduce French classes, Vala became the obvious choice because she had learned the language from the French nuns in Teheran.

  In the meantime, Pauline and her father were beginning to understand each othe
r. ‘As it happened, we had similar personalities,’ she says. ‘We were both thinkers who worked things out logically in our heads.’ Viktor’s way of relating was to give her books and show her how to do practical things. How to eat a mango over the bath to avoid staining your clothes, how to solve mathematical problems. He was delighted when she asked for a small carpentry set for her birthday because it was something they could do together. ‘I was a tomboy who could out-throw, out-run and out-hit everyone in my class. Even the boys were so impressed that they used to ask me to play in the footy team!’ she laughs.

  If she felt like an outsider at times, it was because, apart from her grandfather, she had no extended family, while the other children had grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and a shared past in Geelong.

  ‘I adored Grandpa, he was exactly what a grandfather should be,’ she says. ‘His hobby was French polishing. I loved sitting under our grand piano while he was polishing with bags of shellac all around him. He polished everything, even apples, and whenever I went somewhere special, he would polish my shoes. I was devastated when he died.’

  Throughout her school life, Pauline’s parents insisted that education and knowledge were all that mattered. ‘There was no pressure on me to get married, but relentless pressure to study,’ she recalls.

  Suddenly Vala chimes in proudly, ‘Pauline was the first foreign girl to be head prefect at her high school. I was there when the headmistress announced it to the whole school!’

  Although Vala’s shipboard companion Nadezhda Alexandrovna Metschersky had settled in Sydney, the two women continued to correspond. The elderly Russian aristocrat, whom Vala still calls Kniginia or Princess, was living with her daughter Madame de Vignal and her family in Chatswood. Vala visited her on one occasion and still remembers the elegant furniture, palatial staircase and tastefully planted garden in Madame de Vignal’s home. From the wide terrace that was draped with sweet-scented wisteria, they gazed over the whole city and talked about their lives. ‘The Kniginia was very contented with life in Australia,’ Vala says.

  While in Sydney, Vala took the opportunity to attend a service conducted by Archbishop Rafalsky, who had recently been appointed archbishop of the Russian Orthodox diocese of Australia and New Zealand. The service was held at the new St Peter and Paul Cathedral in Strathfield, which was his achievement. Apart from his phenomenal knowledge of theology, philosophy and music, the archbishop also had a practical mind and a talent for enlisting people’s help. Without any prior experience, he organised building the cathedral which was completed within one year. That same year, 1953, he was awarded the Queen’s Coronation medal for helping Russian and Eastern European refugees settle in Australia.

  While Pauline spoons apples and nectarines spiced with cardamom into our dessert dishes, Vala reminisces about the last time she saw the archbishop. ‘He was such an exceptional human being, such a saintly man, that just being in his presence was enough to move me to tears,’ she says. From my conversation with Archbishop Rafalsky’s biographer, Father Michael Protopopoff, I know that the entire congregation felt the same way. Whenever he raised his arms to heaven in supplication, it seemed as though he was speaking directly to God. They almost expected the Creator to step through the ceiling and arrive in their midst on a shaft of light. Blowing her nose, Vala says, ‘When the archbishop looked at you, he looked into your soul.’

  Archbishop Rafalsky was fifty-nine when he told his tearful congregation that he felt strangely light, as though he was no longer of this world. After conducting his last service, he said, ‘I will never come this way again,’ and tears ran down his gaunt cheeks. He died two days later of coronary complications and was buried in the churchyard of the cathedral that remains his monument to this day.

  When Vala goes to services at the Russian Orthodox church in Geelong, which she helped to found, she always brings her precious prayerbook with the archbishop’s signature on the flyleaf. And Pauline still carries around the holy picture he gave her when she was a little girl on the Derna. It’s frayed now, but she keeps it as a talisman. ‘I’m not religious, but the picture is very special to me because it’s a memento of him,’ she says.

  Vala has brightened up. ‘When I went back to Teheran in 1967, I visited my old convent school and you wouldn’t believe it, they still had the landscape of the Caspian Sea hanging on the wall of my old classroom! The same picture! When I went to see my old ballet teacher from St Petersburg, in the hall with big mirrors where I used to practise, she still wore the same wide bandeau on her forehead. She burst into tears when she recognised me. It was so moving.’

  Teheran had changed enormously in the past twenty-six years, but one ancient street was just as they remembered it from their courting days. ‘Viktor and I couldn’t believe it. We walked along holding hands and not saying a single word. It was like stepping back in time. We didn’t want to break the spell of all the memories around us.’

  Vala didn’t realise how attached she had become to Australia until they returned from that trip. ‘Viktor was restless and found it hard to settle down again, but I knew I belonged here. When one of our Russian friends made a disparaging remark about this being an island of convicts—well, did I let him have it! I told him he knew nothing about it: that the first Australians were dumped here against their will, that they didn’t want to be here away from their families, and they had to work so hard to build things and make things grow. I went into full dramatic flight and when I finally ran out of breath, they all applauded!’

  It took an overseas trip to London in the 1960s for Pauline to realise that Australia was home as well. By then she had gained a BA degree from Monash University, majoring in French, Russian and politics. ‘Studying politics seemed to be an extension of dinner table arguments at home,’ Pauline smiles. ‘After every news broadcast there was a family row, but I learned to stand my ground. Father and I argued fiercely, but we were similar in many ways and that’s probably why we clashed so much. As I got older, we became drinking and debating buddies. Father was very much his own person, not sociable and sunny like Mother. I’m more like him: outwardly gregarious but reserved. I like my own company, whereas Mother makes friends everywhere.’

  After Pauline graduated, she had no idea what work she would do. ‘All I knew was that I was never going to teach.’ This makes me smile, because that’s exactly what I said when I finished my Arts degree, but when my husband Michael and I were living in London, I discovered the joy of teaching students and learning from them in turn, just as Pauline eventually did.

  In 1971 she was appointed Director of Schools and Conferences at the Council of Adult Education. ‘I didn’t have a clue what the job involved, but I learned as I went along and enjoyed it. I was responsible for organising short-term activities, summer schools, seminars, conferences, study tours within Australia. That job was a major turning point in my life because I found my niche in adult education.’

  Three years later she was sent to Edinburgh University to do a postgraduate diploma in adult education, but after her return, she felt restless as there didn’t seem to be much scope for applying the exciting new ideas she had been studying. That’s when she joined the Hawthorn State College, a teacher-training institute in the TAFE system, and found her passion in the very thing she had declared she would never do. ‘Adult education was burgeoning at the time, there were new ideas in the air, new attitudes about teaching adults and giving people a second chance. It was exciting.’

  Pauline distinguished herself by becoming the first female president of the Australian Association of Adult Education. ‘It was just the right time to be in adult education. Whitlam was in power and reform was in the air. But it all petered out by the time I left. The classes were getting bigger, the staff was smaller, courses were collapsing and morale was plummeting. Maybe it always goes like this, in cycles, and perhaps this year’s graduates will be saying the same in time. But after seventeen years, I was ready to retire.’

  Not long a
fter Viktor’s death from lung cancer in 1979, Pauline made her first trip to Russia. Her tour included Tbilisi, where her father’s family had lived before moving to Teheran. ‘Dad used to describe the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in spring, the colourful markets and the Georgian Military Highway that crossed the whole country, so it was familiar and unreal all at once, and very emotional. I liked the Georgians and felt happy that this place was part of my heritage, but my father and I had always planned to go there together and it was sad to be there without him.’

  36

  Albury is a sunny university town on the border of New South Wales and Victoria with well-kept gardens and an air of bustling energy. I’ve come here to talk to Mattie Veneris. Like Lars and Pauline, she sailed to Australia with her mother, her sister Katina and cousins John and Stan in 1948 to join her father who hadn’t seen her since she was a baby.

  Mattie’s grey-haired husband George meets me at the little airport. As we drive along the sunlit streets lined with gum trees, he tells me that he and Mattie lived in neighbouring villages on the Greek island of Kythera and have known each other all their lives. He is the president of Albury’s Greek community, which consists of about eighty families. They are currently raising money to build a house for a resident priest because at the moment he comes only once a month from Sydney.

  ‘It’s not just a matter of religion,’ George says. ‘It’s to keep the community together and maintain our heritage and traditions for future generations. The young people are growing up in a more permissive environment, so it’s harder to keep them involved.’ It’s a problem all minority groups face in a tolerant community.

  Mattie is standing outside their little brick bungalow when we arrive and welcomes me with a beatific smile that lights up her face. She is as thin as a winter sparrow and just as unassuming, apologising for the smell of estapol in the house because their floors are being sanded and polished. As she leads me inside, she explains that her mother couldn’t come because she didn’t want to leave her sick ninety-year-old husband.